Whatever the intellectual quality of the education given our children, it is vital that it include elements of love and compassion, for nothing guarantees that knowledge alone will be truly useful to human beings.
His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
Humans have been reading at least since the late fourth millennium BCE, when pictographic script was first etched into clay tablets with the original stylus, a writing tool sharp enough to leave an impression. And explicit reading instruction in English—directly teaching the links between letters and sounds—has been going on since the sixteenth century.
But it’s just been in the last several decades that we’ve had the benefit of rigorous experiments, massive data sets, and targeted technologies to illuminate how kids learn to read: the earliest roots of reading in children’s lives and parents’ critical role in sustaining them. Perhaps this new knowledge can push us from literacy for the elite to literacy for all.
There are crucial prereading and early-reading subject areas that parents are especially well-equipped to teach kids, with love and lightness, in daily life. They include oral language, speech-sound awareness, and letter-knowledge skills that research shows are critically important for later reading skills. They also include the simple work of familiarizing kids with books and how print works, as well as the more advanced work of matching letters to sounds (and sounds to letters).
Are there other things that parents can and should do to nurture literacy? Absolutely. But these are meaningful, life-altering, often-overlooked areas that are well within our capacity to start addressing (and, yes, teaching) today.
Although abilities like these tend to show up in preschool and kindergarten screenings, they apply to a much wider age span—I’d say from birth to 116, given the remarkable story of a woman named Mary Walker, born in 1848.
Walker’s dream of literacy, beautifully told in Rita Lorraine Hubbard’s picture book The Oldest Student: How Mary Walker Learned to Read, was deferred through slavery and sharecropping, through the lives of two husbands and three sons, and the administrations of twenty-six presidents of the United States. She learned at last at 116 years old, and read until her death at age 121 on December 1, 1969.
“She studied the alphabet until her eyes watered,” Hubbard wrote. “She memorized the sounds each letter made and practiced writing her name so many times that her fingers cramped… She studied and studied, until books and pages and letters and words swirled in her head while she slept. One fine day Mary’s hard work paid off. She could read!”
Literacy is still deferred for too long for too many, for lack of a strong foundation. I know a high school literacy coach whose job is to give teachers strategies to help teenagers who can’t read make sense of the science, math, social studies, and other course content in class. Imagine being expected to learn advanced content with no understanding of the printed information in textbooks and classroom materials.
When she can, the coach pulls students out of class to tutor them in the basics of letter-sound associations that they never mastered in elementary or middle school. It’s not a service she expected to provide high schoolers, but one they desperately need. And who will be there to help them when they struggle after they graduate—or drop out?
Would-be readers of any age must master the basics. There are areas of study that just cannot be skipped.
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives
Think back over your last few months of spending. What were the big-ticket items or experiences that you purchased for your child? If you were to judge yourself on where you invested dollars on their behalf, what would those expenses say about your priorities?
Sports, travel, and clothing topped my list of spending for my daughter this summer. She moved to a new soccer team, which required buying all-new everything: socks, shorts, four different jerseys, a backpack, outer gear for all weather, and the list goes on and on. As luck would have it, the one thing the team didn’t require—new footwear—made its way into our shopping cart anyway, because her old cleats no longer fit.
I’m talking hundreds and hundreds of dollars, far more than I spent on education during the same time frame. Do I value soccer over education? No. Does my spending look like it? Yes.
While there’s not an exact correlation between what we spend and what we value, I do believe that our visible spending sends kids strong messages about our priorities. How we spend says more than we intend.
Reading on the Road
So to tip the scales a bit in reading’s favor, I decided to put a lit-rich trip into the mix. If we can travel to Missouri and Arizona for soccer, I thought, why not go to our nation’s capital for reading? The Planet Word Museum and the National Book Festival had long topped my list of literary destinations to check out, so I brought my mom and my daughter along to make a weekend of it.
The Planet Word Museum was well worth the time and travel. Educator and philanthropist Ann Friedman’s founding vision for transforming the historic building has been beautifully realized, down to minute details like language symbols embedded in flooring and elevator interiors that look like library shelves. Every inch of the space exudes intention and enthusiasm for the human experience of language.
Most remarkable for a museum dedicated to words, it resists the urge to overwhelm visitors with print. It offers immersive, sensory, memorable experiences with language, using movement, light, and sound to capture visitors’ attention. It leaves space for guests to create our own meaning from what we consume, versus having it spoon-fed to us through the long placard descriptions typical of museums.
Everything at Planet Word is engaging, but here are a few of our favorites to give you a taste of the experience.
Global Voices
In your excitement to enter the museum, don’t miss the courtyard’s gorgeous, interactive art. Experiential and evocative, a towering aluminum sculpture, called Speaking Willow by visual artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, commands the space. Ivy creeps up its trunk and bell-shaped LED lights and speakers dangle from its branches.
When visitors pass under, it murmurs words from 364 different languages, representing the languages spoken by more than 99% of the world’s people. The speech —general statements about the various languages and cultures represented—isn’t meant to be parsed. Rather, let the words wash over you and inspire your sense of wonder at the richness, diversity, and interconnectedness of human communication.
Iconic Idioms
The Joking Around exhibit gives visitors a shot at shouting out iconic idioms—if you can take a visual hint from the provided props. We caught on to some pretty quickly, like “in a pickle” and “two peas in a pod,” but others left us stumped… to this day. Go ahead, have at these word puzzles. Then visit Planet Word for more. This light-hearted, interactive exhibit gets kids (and adults) thinking about the playfulness and creativity of figurative language.
The Word Wall of All Word Walls
Kids may be familiar with classroom word walls, filled with high-frequency words or lesson-specific vocab. This is not that. Planet Word’s 22-foot-tall talking word wall tells the story of the English language, through video and illuminated words. Visitors play a role, too, using microphones to interact with the exhibit and help shape the narrative.
Native Speakers
The Spoken World exhibit showcases iPads arrayed around a globe of lights. The screens offer mini-lessons in languages from Icelandic to Wolof, which highlight the diversity of world languages for us, as well as the universality of communicating culture and community. We loved the chance to practice words in unfamiliar tongues and ponder the heritage and identities of the speakers, as well as our own.
Gifts of Gab
I love a good gift shop, and Present Perfect at Planet Word had it all—bookish socks, pins, puzzles, games, and even dishes digging into tricky words like they’re, their, and there. There were books for word nerds of all ages, from Spelling Bee savant Zaila Avant-Garde’s Words of Wonder from Z to A picture book to Joe Gillard’s The Little Book of Lost Words: Collywobbles, Snollygosters, and 86 Other Surprisingly Useful Terms Worth Resurrecting. If you’re on the hunt for a baby shower gift, I recommend this adorable onesie. It pairs perfectly with my book, Reading for Our Lives.
We tapped out after two hours at the museum, which means there’s still much, much more to explore. On our next visit, we’ll be sure to dine at Immigrant Food, tackle a word-puzzle case in Lexicon Lane, and dig into the “I’m Sold” advertising exhibit. And I’m sure we’ll pick up a few more SAT words in the photo booth, sponsored by the College Board.
Long story, short. We loved it. Five stars. We’re sold on the idea that Planet Word truly is “the museum where language comes alive.”
Summer break arrives, and with it, the familiar quest to keep kids reading during their time off from school. Many parents optimistically enroll children in summer reading programs, hoping it helps kids foster a love for books and learning. And to sweeten the pot, libraries tout rewards like coupons and gift certificates to entice kids to hit milestones—say, a certain number of books or minutes read.
As a child who loved to read, I know the appeal personally. I recall carrying a stack of books taller than myself to the checkout desk at my local library in preparation for their summer reading program. I’d scavenge the library, meticulously looking through each section, hoping to find interesting books that were short enough to finish in time to receive a prize.
But now I wonder: What comes first, the love of reading or the enticement of a reward? Do rewards really help kids fall in love with books, or are they just icing on the cake for kids who already enjoy reading?
Let’s look at the arguments for and against summer reading rewards programs—and the story of one library that ditched them in favor of building up kids’ basic reading skills in a county where low literacy is endemic.
The Case for Summer Reading Rewards
Conventional wisdom says incentives get kids into the library, encourage them to seek out books they enjoy, and get them reading more. A whopping 97% of public libraries nationwide offer reward-based reading programs, doling out everything from stickers, stuffed animals, and temporary tattoos to free books, coupons, and tablets. As one librarian noted, kids may come for the prizes but then “leave reading for their own sake.”
Surveys of and interviews with middle schoolers who participated in summer reading programs and their parents suggest that the effectiveness of prizes is a mixed bag: a combination of what’s called “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” motivation.
Essentially, “intrinsic” motivation is when you want to do something for the sense of satisfaction you get from doing it. In this case, that would be reading for the love of reading. “Extrinsic” motivation is when you want to do something because you’ll get some kind of compensation or outside approval for doing it. Here, that would be reading to get a reward.
Popular thinking is that intrinsic motivation is more powerful, but research suggests that people aren’t driven completely by intrinsic motivation or completely by extrinsic motivation, but rather by a complex mix.
Indeed, the surveys showed that some kids who already enjoyed reading appreciated program perks as nice add-on incentives and said they read more than they might have otherwise to meet program targets. Others felt the content of the prize itself was less compelling than the sense of accomplishment they gained from doing the reading required to earn it.
Most of the parents surveyed felt that their kids read more, improved their reading skills, and gained reading confidence as a result of the summer reading rewards programs.
The Case for Ditching Reading Rewards
But not everyone is convinced that such summer rewards programs meaningfully fuel a love for reading—or even that administering them is a good use of librarians’ limited time.
Veteran children’s librarian Anne Kissinger believes libraries should focus on directly helping kids gain reading skills (which many lack, according to the numbers) instead of celebrating pages turned over the summer. In fact, she successfully lobbied for her library system to abandon summer rewards programs altogether.
For years, she says librarians at the Wauwatosa Public Library where she worked spent most summer days stamping coupons for participants in their reading rewards program. In summer 2017 alone, the library system distributed 3,000 rewards.
But at the height of this apparent success of the summer reading program, she worried that the library had evolved into a “clearinghouse” for promotional goods instead of a bastion of reading skill and interest. “They’re not reading for their own enjoyment,” she observed of kids participating. “They’re reading to fill in our logs or meet our requirements.”
With her branch located in a county where 25% of adults read at or below the lowest literacy level, peddling extrinsic motivation at that scale felt to her like shirking responsibility. Faced with the choice of sticking to the status quo or championing a deeper commitment to reading, she advocated to free librarians’ time up from stamping coupons and direct it toward better equipping parents to help their kids learn to read in the first place.
Reading specialist and Wauwatosa library patron Christine Reinders noticed the change in what the library offered physically—and culturally. It had always been a place where parents could find material to read to their children, but now it was becoming a space where parents could support their kids to read to themselves. For example, it was offering more books with simple words that kids can sound out along with more support for parents teaching their children to read.
“‘[Wauwatosa] is a really special place, because they had a library and a children’s librarian who recognized this need” to cultivate basic literacy, Reinders said. “The library was filled with all these wonderful books, but many were not accessible because kids were just learning to read. Now, we have those beginning readers to help them establish that solid foundation to become proficient readers and writers.”
Lessons for Parents From the Reading Rewards Debate
Ultimately, rewards may get some kids in the library and reading more in the short term, but parents would do well to attend to the longer term and intrinsic motivation, too. That’s the kind of motivation that stems from kids learning to read with enough skill, fluency, and understanding to enjoy it.
And libraries like Wauwatosa’s can be great partners in that pursuit when they offer resources for parents about fostering reading skills, as well as simple early reading material for kids.
After all, reading motivation is no simple black-and-white matter. Once we can read, we do it for many reasons: interest in the story, curiosity about the topic, the satisfaction of learning or getting to “the end,” the joy of personal choice, the prospect of a prize. We’re driven by a messy mix of reasons and inspirations. Parents and others hoping to encourage kids to read, or read more, may be best served by leveraging the gamut of motivations.
Confession time: For someone who preaches deep family and community involvement in children’s education, I’m not a constant presence at my daughter’s school. I couldn’t pick many of her teachers out of a lineup, and I rarely sign up for parent-teacher conferences.
In my defense, they’re virtual and so short that by the time we exchange pleasantries, they’re practically over. My emails to the school are mostly logistical: “She’ll miss class for a family commitment/soccer tournament/orthodontist appointment, sorry!” And you know what? I’m okay with that.
The truth is, your involvement with your child’s school will naturally ebb and flow based on your circumstances, interests, and—most importantly—your child’s needs. And that’s exactly as it should be.
When my daughter was younger, I was all in. She attended a public Montessori school for a brief time, and I wore every hat: school board member, reading buddy, field trip chaperone, you name it.
I felt a deep obligation to advocate for all children in a school serving many under-resourced families. Plus, I wanted to make sure she was getting the foundational skills she needed for long-term success. But as she has grown and her needs have changed, so has my school involvement.
Now that she’s a teenager, I focus more on empowering her to take responsibility for her education. I want her to check her own grades, follow up with her teachers, and learn to communicate effectively—life skills as much as academic ones. My role now is backup and coach.
I’m still deeply engaged, but my involvement looks different: daily conversations directly with her, gentle nudges, and teaching moments about things like the perils of group projects, email etiquette with teachers, and how to ask for help.
So, what’s the takeaway for you?
Parental school involvement and supporting your child’s education doesn’t have to look one way. It doesn’t have to mean signing up for every conference, attending every event, or leading the PTA.
It just needs to reflect your family’s unique circumstances and your child’s needs at the moment. And here’s the good news. You get to decide what that looks like.
Three Simple Steps to Meaningful Engagement
- Stay Aware
Keep a pulse on how your child is doing developmentally and academically. If they’re in preschool, know the milestones typical for kids their age. For school-aged kids, familiarize yourself with grade-level expectations and where your child stands. If something feels off, ask questions. Teachers and administrators are there to help. - Reflect on the Data
Look at report cards, state assessment scores, and other information the school provides about your child’s learning. Even a quick review can give you insights. If teachers raise concerns—whether academic or behavioral—engage in constructive dialogue and work together to find solutions. - Seek Support When Needed
If challenges arise—and they will at some point, about something—explore resources both within and beyond the school. Schools often offer tutoring, reading buddies, or other support. Libraries, community organizations, and even your personal network can be incredible allies in your child’s learning journey, too.
Above all, give yourself permission to change your approach and intensity as you and your child grow. Some seasons of life will call for all-hands-on-deck engagement. Others may let you step back. Both are okay.
Set Your Own Standard
Here’s the bottom line: Thoughtfully decide how you want to show up for your child, and then show up that way. Whether you’re the board member parent, the email-only parent, or somewhere in between, your ultimate goal is the same: to meet your child’s needs and support their development. Sometimes for busy parents that means leaning on others, too—a partner, grandparent, or someone else who can fill in when you can’t.
You don’t have to do it all. Nurturing a child’s development is its own kind of group project.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives This year marks the 10th anniversary of my turn as The Richmond Christmas Mother, a community fundraising campaign I led that raised more than $325,000 to make the holidays a little brighter for Central Virginia families in need. It was the 80th anniversary of the Christmas Mother Fund, and I was the youngest woman—and first black woman—to helm the effort. I quipped at the time that for the last several years the committee had selected Christmas Grandmothers. (Daphne Maxwell Reid, the original Aunt Viv from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, followed me in the role in 2018.)
In retrospect, that campaign signaled a turning point—not just for the fund, but for me personally. It marked a pivotal early step in my personal transformation from community volunteer and book cheerleader to early literacy leader and parent engagement pro. The campaign added “child literacy advocate” to my name in news headlines for the first time, and it stuck. In the years since, I’ve added new titles like “author” and “parent educator” to the mix, as I’ve sharpened my understanding of what it takes to really move the needle on reading achievement.
The Christmas Mother Fund historically directed most of its support to the Salvation Army’s Christmas assistance programs. But during my tenure, we expanded its impact by launching a competitive grant project in partnership with the Community Foundation. We interpreted “Christmas” broadly to extend all the way from Thanksgiving to New Year’s and aimed to reach into 80 different pockets of the community through local organizations big and small. This allowed us to support incredible work, such as providing home-cooked meals to homebound seniors and disabled people and bringing joy to kids battling cancer.
While I did the usual hustling—placing calls, talking with media, meeting with local businesses, and presenting to civic organizations—I also put my own spin on the campaign. I donated copies of Each Kindness and other Jacquelyn Woodson books to local children at schools and child care centers. By the season’s end, I’d distributed more than 1,000 books. My Christmas Parade float, too, reflected my passion for literacy: I decked out a trolley in homage to Ezra Jack Keats’s classic picture book The Snowy Day. The marvel of art, craft, and engineering on wheels was brought to life by a dedicated team of volunteers. (Yes, we hung countless hand-cut snowflakes from the trolley windows to ensure a white Christmas.) All in the hopes of inspiring reading, encouraging parents to read to their children, and getting families to give books for Christmas instead of only toys.
Along the Dominion Energy Christmas Parade route, I tossed stuffed dolls of Peter, the main character of The Snowy Day, into the crowd. (Throwing board books into the air felt too risky.) I was joined by author friends Meg Medina, Gigi Amateau, Robin Farmer, and Stacy Hawkins Adams. At the time, I thought I might follow them into publishing fiction. Instead, I walked a different path, writing for parents and encouraging families to raise readers.
This wasn’t my first foray into advocacy. Previously, I’d launched a campaign to raise funds and awareness for Friends Association for Children, an early childhood development center that I adored and that I later highlighted in the conclusion of Reading for Our Lives. But my Christmas mother campaign gave me a platform to articulate what I now see as my core conviction: if we want to address society’s most entrenched challenges, we need to invest in children’s early education and literacy.
Looking back at a 2014 interview with Cheryl Miller on Virginia This Morning, I’m reminded of how long and deeply I’ve held this belief. All those years ago I said, “I’m a really big advocate for early childhood education programs and literacy programs for our children. I think as a community, we can invest more in children earlier and prevent a lot of the problems that many social-service organizations are grappling with as the children age.”
Some things never change! Ten years in the game and I say some version of this daily. Only now, I have the privilege of taking stages nationwide to spread the message. In 2024 alone, I addressed thousands of early childhood educators, K-12 teachers, librarians, interventionists, and parent educators in states as far-flung as Wisconsin, Louisiana, Iowa, Ohio, Maryland, Florida, and Idaho.
The Richmond Christmas Mother campaign wasn’t just a fundraiser. It was a turning point, a launchpad, and a testament to the power of a community coming together to create change. It’s been 10 years, but the lessons I learned and the momentum it sparked continue to shape the work I do today.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Literacy First, an Austin-based high-impact tutoring program, kicked off its 30th anniversary celebrations in a meaningful way: with a virtual book club discussion of my book, Reading for Our Lives.
Rather than just retrospective fanfare, the organization chose to ponder its mission by engaging staff, board members, district partners, and the broader community in a thoughtful dialogue about work outside of its current scope. The topic: engaging with parents of kids before they arrive in school. This choice underscores Literacy First’s commitment to continuous learning and using collaboration to drive change.
Reading for Our Lives Book Discussion
It was a pleasure to join the conversation with readers who had already engaged with the book. Their questions showed real curiosity and thought, diving into the nuances of my writing process: Why that title? How did I decide which histories and voices to feature? We also explored practical strategies for supporting young readers—tools that anyone, whether a parent, teacher, or community member, could use.
The discussion took on some of today’s most pressing literacy topics, including how to embrace multilingualism as an asset to literacy development. Another topic we addressed was the role organizations like Literacy First, along with partners such as BookSpring and school districts, can play in achieving literacy for all children.
Participants were eager to dig into early literacy milestones, reflecting on the need for schools to raise expectations around specific literacy skills like phonemic awareness and decoding. A recurring theme emerged: the challenge of communicating to parents and educators that just good enough isn’t good enough—early literacy skills matter deeply, and they set the foundation for future success.
We also tackled practical concerns. How can preschools recognize the importance of systematic instruction? What strategies work for families with neurodiverse children or late talkers who aren’t ready to jump into conversations but still want to build literacy skills? And finally, I was asked a fun yet intriguing question: Have you thought about starting a podcast? (My answer: Try me in 2026!)
Literacy First: The Gold Standard of Reading Tutors
For three decades, Literacy First has set the bar for reading intervention through its effective approach, inclusivity, and measurable impact. Serving students from kindergarten through second grade in both English and Spanish, the program will support 2,000 children this year—adding to the more than 30,000 students it has helped since its founding.
I’ve followed Literacy First since 2017, and I can attest that it’s the real deal. During my time in Austin, I had the opportunity to observe its tutor training sessions, attend a tutor swearing-in ceremony, visit schools to see tutors in action, and celebrate the program’s successes. Making it possible for well-trained tutors to intensively support kids’s reading development in English or Spanish for 30 minutes a day 5 days a week is as impactful as it is rare.
Two key lessons stood out during my Literacy First observations. First, focus and intensity matter. To be effective, educators need to engage with research, identify the exact skills students need, and deliver targeted instruction at a dosage high enough to move the needle. Second, tracking progress is essential. Literacy First not only holds itself accountable to results, but it also makes sure its efforts translate into measurable improvements for students.
A Reading Mission That Matters
I’ve seen firsthand how transformative qualified tutors can be. There’s simply no substitute for a focused, intentional effort to teach more people how to teach reading. Sadly, in too many settings, reading tutoring falls short—not due to lack of effort, but because of a lack of expertise and funding.
Children deserve better. They need programs like Literacy First that combine research-backed methods with a commitment to excellence and accountability.
After 30 years of remarkable impact, Literacy First remains a beacon of hope for students, families, and educators. Despite its age, I think it’s just getting started.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Newsflash:
All those beautiful children’s books you’ve been collecting?
They won’t help your child learn to read or love it unless you actually read them—regularly. Sharing books with kids gives them indelible experiences and positive emotions around reading that make them want to read on their own. Yet many parents focus on what they plan to read to their kids and neglect the urgent matter of assigning time to actually do it.
And it’s no wonder. Endless book reviews and recommendations (mine included!) feed our picture book cravings and tout books for every theme, holiday, or moment in your child’s life. The coverage journalists and influencers give to the content of books grows our libraries and Amazon wish lists, far outpacing reports on how to build strong family reading habits.
There’s a lot to keep us parents from reading to our kids daily—from a wavering motivation to read and competing priorities to busyness, fatigue, and more. Not to mention our kids’ moods, attention span, age, and interest level.
But I’m here to tell you that looking beyond bedtime and identifying multiple, recurring opportunities to read with your child will pay off big-time. Building these routines not only fosters better vocabulary and language skills for your little one, but also more quality time, bonding, and well-being for the whole family.
The Anatomy of Family Reading Culture
Let’s face it: Reading stories is important, but building reading culture is transformative. Culture requires depth and frequency, so families that weave multiple strands of reading into the fabric of their daily lives reap the greatest impact.
Each family’s reading culture is the product of a unique mix of resources, relationships, and rituals. Factors include the books and other reading material you have in your home, how you show up to share them, and how frequently you do so. All of these can nurture your kids’ reading attention, interest, and motivation.
A family living in a book desert, for example, might not have much reading material, but could read fewer texts more frequently and with great warmth and get good results nonetheless. By the same token, a family with more resources might fill a child’s room with kid-lit but never take the time to read or discuss the books together—coming up short on relationships and rituals. Luckily, regardless of your starting point, there are always opportunities to ramp up your book collection, book talk, and reading routines.
Of all these elements of reading culture, rituals are especially powerful, because they increase the dosage of the other two: reading material and relationships. Reading together daily—preferably multiple times a day—boosts your child’s exposure to the vocabulary and knowledge in a wide range of books, plus it increases your engagement and conversation. The benefits of consistency are so pronounced that I believe that when you choose to read to your child matters as much as what you choose to read.
Designing Reading Rituals
Ready to establish some reading rituals to ensure that the books you’ve been collecting get read and discussed? Here’s how:
Step One: Choose Your Moments
As I learned from behavior scientist BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits method, timing is critical. Fogg recommends consciously tethering new habits you want to build to your most deeply entrenched existing routines. This makes it easier to remember and implement the new habits. That’s part of why bedtime story reading is such a common ritual for families, with 87% of more than 2,000 parents surveyed by Scholastic saying their read-alouds occurred at bedtime or naptime. Kids go to sleep (or at least get in bed) every night, so it’s less of a stretch to add reading into the mix of tucking them in.
Bedtime is far from the only consistent, daily event that you can anchor reading to, though. Pay attention to your time with your child and make a list of the daily habits, routines, and points of interaction you share. Do you wake them up? Prepare meals? Eat together? Drive them to daycare or other activities? List out all the recurring moments. Think of things you do before noon, afternoon, and in the evening, right before they go to bed, etc.
Step Two: Brainstorm Behaviors
With your existing patterns in mind, look for opportunities to make reading tag alongside those activities.
Can you open up a book of five-minute stories after you wake your little one? Turn on an audiobook after you fasten your seat belt in the car? Point out words and letters on signs, or comment on your morning reading, as you drive through your neighborhood?
The goal is to weave reading and literacy into your day via small actions, making new behaviors as inevitable as brushing your teeth or eating dinner. Think of “tiny” as something that can be done in 30 seconds or less or in 5 reps or less, e.g. reading a page of a book (not reading for an hour) or pointing out a word or letter (not a dozen).
This doesn’t mean that you can’t aim high, just that you’re focused on starting small and (importantly!) celebrating sooner.
Step Three: Celebrate Your Successes
As you try out new habits, remember to celebrate your wins. Parents don’t get enough credit, so give yourself a mental high-five every time you successfully incorporate reading into a new part of your day. You could also celebrate out loud and bring your little one in on the action. Give them a high five along with saying “we did it!” to share your enthusiasm with them and put an exclamation mark on the experience.
In the Tiny Habits method, celebrations are truly the key to making the new behaviors repeatable. When you give yourself a pat on the back, pump your fist, or engage in the celebration of your choice immediately after accomplishing the new habit, you reinforce that behavior. Your celebration’s positive vibes trigger a dopamine surge, wiring your brain to link your habit with those feel-good moments.
If, on the other hand, you follow the accomplishment by mentally beating yourself up for not reading more, or sooner, or better, you do the opposite—discourage yourself. So be your own cheerleader to best instill positive habits.
As Fogg puts it in the Tiny Habits book: “There is a direct connection between what you feel when you do a behavior and the likelihood that you will repeat the behavior in the future.”
That’s great news! It means that we can form new habits quickly, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not how many times you repeat a habit that makes it stick. It’s how positive your emotions connected to the habit are— and that’s something we can consciously impact.
Step Four: Tweak and Repeat
Start by experimenting with a few new reading habits at once, so you can compare and contrast results. Don’t feel pressured to nail the perfect routine immediately. Try different times and methods of incorporating reading and see what sticks. This is a design process. Observe what works, adapt when needed, and keep refining your approach.
Through it all, stay tuned in to your child. If they’re squirmy before meals, distracted during playtime, or tired at night, don’t push it—try other times and places. And if the books you’ve picked aren’t grabbing their attention, switch things up until you find some they love.
Remember, the most compelling picture book in the world won’t build a lasting reading habit on its own. You reading it regularly to your child will.
And a proven way to make that happen is the kind of purposeful behavior design described above, bolstered by positive emotions. So skip obsessing over finding the perfect books and focus on weaving reading throughout your busy days instead.
Every parent deserves to feel empowered as their child’s first teacher—and every child deserves the chance to thrive. That’s the driving force behind my book Reading for Our Lives and the community campaign I’ve built around it.
I wrote this book for parents raising readers, but I now have family-facing professionals in mind, too: nurses, early intervention specialists, child development educators, and social workers that parents turn to for guidance. These trusted advisors are uniquely positioned to share the book with families and help them act on its messages.
That’s why I created a way for generous readers to donate copies of Reading for Our Lives in bulk to organizations that already serve families. While some people are buying extra copies to give out at baby showers or pediatrician waiting rooms, I wanted to make it easier to give at scale—to get dozens or hundreds of books into programs with real reach.
The Impact in Action
Take Penfield Children’s Center in Milwaukee, which sends trained parent and child support professionals into homes to serve more than 1,600 children under age three in Milwaukee County alone. They already deliver children’s books, puzzles, and learning games to support early literacy. Now, they’ll be able to offer Reading for Our Lives to support parents too, giving them tools, inspiration, and confidence to lead their children’s learning from the start.
The book campaign will also deliver free books to families served by organizations including Penfield Children’s Center, Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee, and St. Francis Children’s Center.
How It Works
I’m thrilled to partner with Harmonic Harvest, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit whose mission of community empowerment aligns perfectly with Reading for Our Lives. This collaboration combines their expertise in community engagement with my focus on early literacy to create lasting change for families. When you donate to the Reading for Our Lives Book Fund, Harmonic Harvest handles the logistics—issuing tax receipts and working with local independent booksellers to distribute copies to partner organizations. Your dollars support families, community organizations, and neighborhood businesses all at once, creating impact that extends far beyond individual books.
This isn’t just about dropping off books and walking away. Every program that receives donated copies also gets access to live virtual Q&A calls with me, plus invitations to educational events and conversations. We’re not just building readers—we’re building a community of support around them.
Join the Movement
If you believe that every parent deserves support and every child deserves the chance to thrive, I invite you to contribute to the Reading for Our Lives Book Fund today. Together, we can put powerful books in the hands of families and the professionals who walk alongside them every day.
Let’s build something beautiful—one book, one conversation, one child at a time.
Here’s what happened when Fox 6’s Carl Deffenbaugh and I talked about turning lazy summer days into literacy goldmines.
Picture this: It’s July in Milwaukee. School’s been out for weeks, and parents are wondering if their kids’ brains are slowly turning to mush. Sound familiar?
That’s exactly what Carl Daffenbaugh (fellow Medill School of Journalism alum!) and I unpacked during my recent Fox 6 Milwaukee morning show appearance.
Plot twist: When summer breaks the rigid routines of the school year, all learning isn’t lost. The change of season creates space for the kind of natural, joyful learning that actually sticks.
Your Minivan Is a Mobile Classroom for Summer Learning
Summer is a goldmine for language and literacy learning—precisely because routines are disrupted. Those long road trips, impromptu museum visits, and endless grocery runs? They’re packed with learning potential.
Think about it: Words like acceleration, corkscrew, and harness may show up in class someday—but at an amusement park, staring up at the foreboding climbs and precipitous drops? That’s vocabulary in action: vivid, memorable, meaningful.
Unlike the classroom, summer hands you organic teaching moments at every turn. The farmer’s market becomes a lesson in colors, textures, and seasons. The drive-through line becomes an opportunity to read menus together. All you have to do is notice—and talk.
The Great Baby Talk Debate (Spoiler: You Can Do Both)
During the segment, I urged viewers to treat their babies’ coos and babbles as real conversation, and to respond. Yes, even when it sounds like gibberish. These early “chats” help build the brain connections that support language and reading later on.
Carl brought up the question every parent wonders about: Is baby talk bad for kids?
My response: Go ahead and use silly voices sometimes—kids love them. But pair it with real words for real things. Say “Look at the enormous truck!” instead of “Wook at da big-big twuck!”
You are your child’s primary vocabulary builder. If you don’t introduce rich, meaningful words, who will?
The Research That Will Blow Your Mind
“There are correlations between the language skills of toddlers and their IQ and vocabulary as middle schoolers,” I shared with Carl and the Fox 6 audience.
Think about that. The words you and your two-year-old exchange today predict their language and literacy performance years down the road.
The action step? Continue having those back-and-forth conversations. Ask your little ones lots of questions and give them opportunities to think and use the vocabulary they’ve learned.
Those everyday chats about cloud shapes, grocery lists, and bedtime stories are building your child’s academic future, one conversation at a time.
Permission to Keep Summer Learning Simple
Here’s your official permission slip: Effective literacy support doesn’t require turning your home into a school this summer.
“Even if your child is two or three, you can start pointing out letters. This is an S—see how it curves? These little things that don’t feel like lessons are really impactful over time,” I explained to viewers.
The magic happens in the moments that don’t feel like teaching at all. Weave the summer learning lessons into everyday life—it’s easier for you and more effective for them.
The Bottom Line
Want to dive deeper? All of this—and so much more—is in Reading for Our Lives: The Urgency of Early Literacy and the Action Plan To Help Your Child. Because raising readers shouldn’t be complicated, but it should be intentional.
In May, I had the incredible privilege of interviewing Ibram X. Kendi during the Milwaukee stop of his Malcolm Lives tour. The event, hosted by America’s Black Holocaust Museum, Niche Book Bar, and Boswell Books, was electric—equal parts literary conversation, history lesson, and community gathering.
But what moved me most? The kids.
The crowd was mostly adults, so the wide-eyed young readers stuck out, and I made sure to call on them during the open Q&A. They raised their hands. They asked questions. They waited patiently (and giddily) in line to get their books signed. And they walked out with more than an autograph—they left with a spark.
Bringing kids to author events isn’t just cute or educational. It’s transformational.
1. Meeting the Author Makes the Book Come Alive
When young people meet an author, the words on the page suddenly feel personal. They’re no longer reading a story by a name—they’re engaging with a real person who chose every scene, fact, and phrase with care.
As Kendi explained during our talk, “Stories are the greatest teachers.” And when kids hear directly from the storyteller, their learning deepens. They get behind-the-scenes access to the writing process, the research, the emotional labor—and the joy. One young attendee asked what inspired Kendi to write this book. His answer was that he wanted young people facing tough circumstances to see themselves in Malcolm and think, “Despite all of that, I can still transform the world.”
2. They See Reading and Writing as Real, Powerful Work
We often talk about reading as a gateway to academic success. But seeing an author in action reframes it: reading is a gateway to connection, conversation, and change.
Kendi described how he became a “real reader” at age 23. At the time, he was in graduate school, surrounded by peers who were referencing books and authors he hadn’t yet read. That experience stirred a sense of urgency—and humility. He felt like an outsider, unsure if he belonged. So he dove in, reading nearly 100 books in a single year. “Creating spaces where reading is valued where you feel like you have to read to belong—that’s what did it for me, ” he said. “And that’s what did it for Malcolm.”
When kids attend an author talk, they don’t just hear about the book. They experience reading and writing as tools for exploration, empowerment, and expression.
3. It Plants Seeds for Lifelong Curiosity
Books carry stories. Events create memories. Together, they build identity.
One powerful element of the Malcolm Lives event was the setting: America’s Black Holocaust Museum. As Kendi shared Malcolm’s story—one of displacement, resistance, transformation—the museum’s exhibits stood as a living testament to the broader black experience in America. It was history and present-day reckoning, all in one place.
In our conversation, we talked about how Kendi layered the book with “split screens” of past and present, inviting readers to see how history still shapes their neighborhoods, families, and prospects today. That kind of framing helps young people see reading not just as decoding words but as decoding the world.
4. It’s a Memory You’ll Both Treasure
Author events amplify your everyday family literacy rituals. They’re not just about the Q&A or the autograph; they’re about walking out with your child and hearing them say, “I want to read more about that.” Or “I didn’t know Malcolm lived in Milwaukee.” Or even, “I want to write something, too.”
Want to raise a real reader? Bring them to author talks. Let them ask questions. Let them be moved. Let them see that behind every book is a person—and that people like them write books, too.And if you missed Dr. Kendi’s Milwaukee stop, Malcolm Lives is available now. Grab a copy and read it together. The story’s powerful. The conversations it sparks? Even more so.